15 Microsoft Ignite sessions every Exchange admin should see (2017)

Microsoft hosted its annual Ignite conference in Orlando this September. Ignite was massive at 1695 sessions. Almost 300 sessions more than last year. That is a lot of sessions! Many are posted at the Ignite channel on YouTube or through the Microsoft Ignite On Demand portal. Here are the top 15 sessions I think every Exchange admin should watch.

Tip: I have included notes for each session and the time each topic starts. You can expand the session notes under each video by clicking “Show more session notes”

Thrive as an enterprise organization in Microsoft Exchange OnlineIf you could only watch one session then it should be this one. In this session, Jeff Kizner reveals a slew of announcements for Exchange Online. Announcements include; highly requested coexistence features for Exchange hybrid and, new advances in a tenant to tenant migrations. Jeff demonstrates a mailbox move between two Office 365 tenants using MRS and PowerShell.

Mailbox Plans (4:06 mins)

Set-MailboxPlan can now assign a retention policy to a mailbox when the mailbox is provisioned.

Set-CASMailboxPlan (new cmdlet) can now configure whether ActiveSync, IMAP, and POP are enabled on a mailbox when it is provisioned in Office 365.

Hybrid wizard will ask you which on-prem policies you want to copy into Office 365 (e.g. OWA, ActiveSync and Retention policies)

User’s mailbox, when moved to Office 365, will retain their existing policy assignments

Hybrid publishing (50:52 mins)

Hybrid recipient management (54:16 mins)

Jeff’s team is working towards allowing admins to make changes to attributes in Office 365 and have those attributes sync back to on-prem. This will remove the need to keep Exchange on-prem for recipient management.

Jeff’s team is also looking at changing the source of authority on synchronized objects to Azure Active Directory.

Modern authentication for Exchange Server on-premises Greg Taylor discusses two new modern authentication scenarios coming to Exchange on-premises. One scenario which will be available to Exchange 2013 and 2016. And a future scenario that will be available in Exchange 2019. No bunnies were harmed in the delivery of this session.

Importance of Modern Authentication (2:39 mins)

Allows Outlook to authenticate with a token

An easier route to enable Outlook for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Relies on strong network connectivity

Two implementations of modern authentication will ship (7:10 mins)

Exchange 2013 / 2016 implementation expected by December 2017

Exchange 2019 implementation will ship when new release ships second half 2018

Overview of how modern authentication works (10:00 mins)

Modern auth will only work with MAPI over HTTP.

No RPC over HTTP support.

Exchange will use modern auth for all client connections, regardless of whether they originate from inside or outside the network.

Example of modern auth during autodiscover (15:35 mins)

Authorization type of “Bearer” is Outlook instructing Exchange that it can do modern authentication

Exchange Online Multi-Geo CapabilitiesBrian Day discusses the new multi-geo capabilities of Exchange Online. In this session we learn how mailboxes can be moved into other regions to satisfy data residency requirements. Brian emphasizes that this capability is not intended to improve client connectivity but purely for compliance requirements.

Secure Exchange on-premises as well as Microsoft secures Exchange Online Andrew Higginbotham and Raji Dani discuss securing Exchange on-premises and how Microsoft secures Exchange online. Be sure to check out the demos at the end. Office 365 tenant admins will be able to penetration test their own tenants (coming January 2018).